Lauren Hockenson of BitTorrent: We Can Still Live In A World Where Privacy Is Achievable

Kavi Guppta
, ContributorI write about technology and how it impacts workforce transformation.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

How I’m Informed is a look into the reading and learning habits of people from all walks of life. Tweet me @kaviguppta if you know someone interesting who should be featured.

Lauren Hockenson is the Editorial and Social Media Manager at BitTorrent. She tweets regularly, and quite humorously, as @lhockenson.

What is your daily reading habit?

My daily reading habit is a hold-over from my journalism days -- I pretty much consume everything in a firehose, either through my Feedly or Twitter. I find that it makes me more publication-agnostic, and gives me the agency to read what I want to read (good journalism) efficiently.

There are some highlights and must-reads I have, across many interest areas. When I'm in the mood for something tech or science, I am most drawn to to Ars Technica or Quartz -- I'm partial to longreads on topics not usually covered by mainstream tech media, and those places always deliver. Plus, I often get a good revelation, like the fact that dumping truckloads of Splenda into my iced coffee has likely put me at risk for glucose intolerance.

Before my tech media days, I actually was a music and celebrity journalist, and I have daily conversations with friends about music and pop culture. I am an avid reader of New York Magazine's Vulture (R.I.P. The Star Market), Complex, Previously.TV and the entertainment section of The Wire.

I'm also a fan of culture, gender and media, so I am a sucker for pieces on McSweeney's, The Toast, explainers on Vox and others. I also stalk writers in this space: a byline with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roxane Gay, Anita Sarkeesian or Janet Mock will always get a read.

Of course, if I just want all of these three things at once, I peruse Wired's Underwire blog. That site is probably the closest reflection of how my brain works on a daily basis, but unfortunately with less K-Pop.

What has been a recent source of inspiration? Give an example.

Blame it on my burgeoning Twitter addiction -- it's become an increasingly large part of my day since I moved to San Francisco in March -- but I am obsessed with Rusty Foster's Today in Tabs.

A newsletter that somehow manages to distill the best and worst parts about journalism, social media conversation, and rap albums, Today in Tabs just came back and now has a home on Fast Company's Labs site. I like my news delivered to me, so the ping in my inbox from the Today in Tabs TinyLetter is Pavlovian to me at this point. I have to drop everything and read it end-to-end, giggling at my desk like a maniac. And it always leads me to an article I will love to read or love to hate-read.

What is required to fully legitimize peer-to-peer file sharing?

This is a question we are constantly discussing at BitTorrent, and I am positive that there are smarter folks at my company who can really answer it thoughtfully. But, I think we're getting close to opening up mainstream minds and showing that there's so much more to the protocol.

We're opening it up in two important ways:

The company has become an active and prominent voice in the issues surrounding Net Neutrality. We have intimate experience there. We're actively participating alongside companies like Netflix and Reddit to protest against proposed rules like the Internet "Fast Lane" -- essentially a pay-for-play model that allows ISPs to charge a premium for a better network. Part of that protest has been showing how our uTP protocol has been effective in managing congested networks.

We have a great team on our Bundles product that hooks up artists with an easy way to distribute their work. Working with artists like Moby, Zed's Dead and Curren$y has been really effective in proving to artists in and out of the mainstream that we want to be a direct-to-fan alternative that skips traditional record labels.

The products we're working on at BitTorrent are designed to show users that we can still live in a world where privacy is achievable, even on the Internet. Our file-sharing product, Sync, is essentially designed to keep sensitive information out of the cloud and off of servers -- something we could not do without sophisticated peer-to-peer technology. Likewise for Bleep, the chat product we just released to Open Alpha. We're working to redesign the Internet from the ground-up around decentralized networks -- I am lucky just to sit next to them and drink an obscene amount of Diet Coke.

What's the hardest lesson you've learned working in the tech industry?

The tech media cycle -- and online media in general -- is brutally fast and endless. It's also an environment where everyone believes that they are more knowledgeable than you, that they care about the subject more, or that you are a corporate shill. It's important that, in this world, you don't stop believing what you do and you learn how to tune out the noise that tells you that you can't. No one got anywhere believing that everything they did was always garbage.